Going to the very heart of Zen.

March 20, 2017

Overcoming our delusions

There is no liberation without a setting free of that which was imprisoned.In Buddhism, realizing our Buddha-nature is accomplished by removing that which is empty and illusory which makes our Buddha-nature seem absent or hidden but worse, makes what is empty and illusory seem real—too real.

In this inverted state (viparyāsa) we cling to the unreal and reject the real.As a consequence, it becomes difficult, if not impossible for us to seek and to find the pure Mind, i.e., our Buddha-nature insofar as our pure Mind is entirely covered over by thought-constructions, hidden inside an illusory body (one we believe to be our default self).

Our proper Buddhist education has to begin with reversing our long and deeply held deluded view of what we believe to be reality because, to be frank, it is totally wrong.It’s like believing the sun orbits the earth, refusing to believe otherwise. Is this a kind of delusion that begins from birth?The answer is yes, it is a delusion insofar as it is held with a very strong, unconscious conviction despite the evidence going counter to it such as the fact that things are always changing being in this regard mere appearances in which nothing is substantial.

This is the fact that those new to Buddhism must face.It is a fact that they can nod their heads to but never actually live as if this is reality. Nevertheless, to reiterate, all things are only appearances or māyā being a kind of duplicity. They are not actually real—they are only relatively real insofar as we value and cling to them treating and utilizing them as being the only reality for a small period of time. As long as we continue on this wrong track we remain deluded. An interesting aside, Karl Jaspers proposed 3 criteria for delusional beliefs in 1913: 1) the fixity of belief; 2) incorrigibility; 3) impossibility (e.g., Muhammad didn't plunder or have anyone killed).

The third or 'impossibility' is our acceptance that the world we live and die in is the only reality when it is not. The further science looks within, so the speak, like the Buddha of old, it sees a much different reality. It is Mind which is the matrix of all things.

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MStrinado: much of the material of my blogs is now being organized and incorporated into a book.
The post "Kant and âtma" contained a link to another blog of mine where the title of the post was "Kant and the True Self".

Kant and the True Self
(July 2015)

We might define God as:

1) The fullness and immanent omnipresence of the perfect universal moral law.
2) The perfection of the knowledge and being of man's true self which results in the liberation and transcendence from all conditioned phenomena.
3) The fullness and perfection of spiritual love for another person.
4) The universal harmony and order of all manifestation/phenomena.

It is truly amazing how Schopenhauer and others saw such profound and wide-ranging things in Kant's large and turgid Critique of Pure Reason. Kant repeats over and over again in the Transcendental dialectic (the Critique is probably the most repetitious philosophy book ever) what his main goal is. If the main theme of the book is the self-knowledge of reason (or thus self-knowledge) and the radical distant critical look at the world, and the path of universal a priori knowledge, its plot is not the beggar discovering his kingly nature but the exact inverse, the dethroning and humiliation of reason and the cutting of her wings and dismissal of the usage of her highest categories as mere sophistry or as having their legitimate use only as a regulating function for empirical science or this very critical philosophy itself. On the other hand we might interpret this using the analogy of the fulcrum of a lever or the hub of a wheel: the true self of man, which is also the true moral personhood, with its freedom, transcendence and unconditioned nature (together with is capacity of transcendental-critical self-knowledge) must transcend reason herself, causality, space and time, just as the hand must be distinct from the tool to be able to use it. In this sense we might say, with Schopenhauer, that Kant made the radical discovery (in an indirect sense; he radically distinguished the mere exterior unity of apperception from the true transcendent noumenical subject, though he hardly touched the truth that this self can be known with all certainty) of the true self âtma and its distinctness from the false or individual self that is co-conditioned with the world. Kant opened the door to true metaphysics and shed light on a radical different relationship that could exist between the âtma and the world (dimly foreshadowed by the monadology and the "seeing all things in God") that leaves behind forever Spinoza and Leibniz (some argue that the ontological argument, specially as perfected by Gödel, is not entirely free from the shadow of Spinoza) . Kant was a purification and clarification of the fundamental thought of Descartes involving the cogito.
Also Kant in the Critique keeps hammering in the anti-theological consequences of his work; he seldom mentions that the anti-materialist and anti-naturalist/realist consequences are just as final and drastic, which he seemed perhaps not too happy to accept. Indeed Kant exhibited a dogmatic, closed-minded attitude in criticizing Swedenborg and a voluntary blindness to empirical facts and evidence that already refute standard materialism or naturalism. The question is, how does this abstract anti-rationalism/theology of the Critique directly serve the combat against religious fundamentalism and totalitarianism ? The true self of man is the âtma, the essential free unconditioned transcendent pure self and man's goal is to come to this higher self-knowledge (which is also the higher knowledge of the world) through morality, higher critical philosophy and spiritual cultivation. Since the true self is not the platonic (specially Proclean), scholastic or rationalist finite conditioned soul (the deterministic spiritual automaton), it cannot be subject, affected by conditioned elements or the world (and entails a politics founded not on end-justifies the means organic evolutionary rationalism, but on transcendent freedom, duty and morality), nor be bound by any posthumous space or time, nor can God be conceived in anyway in the likeness of a conditioned phenomenal power or ruler with laws, rewards and punishments.

Wow, Mathesis, all that mental activity and still you cannot see the treasure which was yours before a single thought arose. Describe it and it flees from you. Grasp for it and it slips away. Think about it and it's already gone. But it is never very far if you have the good fortune to meet a friend who can point it out, and you have the wisdom to listen.

Buddha did not espouse philosophy. he only taught a discipline, a practice, by which to realize the experience of the truth. Buddha was/is anti-philosophical, understanding that philosophy, or the search for truth through our limited minds is mostly just a trap for smart or smarter than average people. Enlightenment is counter-intuitive, it requires the cessation of thought or thinking as a way, a path, to knowing in the sense of enlightened truth. Buddha espoused being, experiencing, as the only truth, the only true knowing. Philosophy is mostly a trap for smart people. A paradox, a duality, but not a transcendent path. The true path is opposite of our ability to reason, to think, to compare and to imagine. It is transcendent and experiential. Post modernist philosophy in particular, self-referential, reflecting often upon other post=modernists, and spinning clever trails that lead nowhere truly, empty, delivering nothing new, but making those who are unwary believe that the mental gyrations and efforts of intellectual energy required to consider, understand and grasp them - seemingly wisdom and extraordinary knowledge - when in fact it is just another version of fallacy, lies, and ignorance. the beauty of the truth - the transcendent - is that it is simple, not at all dependent on the cleverness of anyone. Which is precisely why it so hard for people to realize. I see this in hoffman- just a latest version. Beware philosophy/'science' as a path to transcendent truth.